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Bigger Than Life

December 31, 2008

Hollywood has ever found drama in medicine, from Paul Muni’s turn in “The Life of Louis Pasteur” to Robin Williams in Oliver Sacks’s “Awakenings,” but perhaps the greatest and most harrowing of medical movies is Nicholas Ray’s “Bigger Than Life,” from 1956, which is playing in a splendid new print at Film Forum. The film is based on an article that ran in this magazine in the September 10, 1955 issue. In a nonfiction piece called “Ten Feet Tall,” the medical writer Berton Roueché relates the development of a newly available and remarkably powerful drug—cortisone—and its disturbing side effects:

Mental derangements unequivocally attributable to cortisone have been reported by hundreds of clinicians. In many cases, these disturbances simulate with absolute fidelity the syndromes classically characteristic of paranoia, schizophrenia, and manic-depressive psychosis.

Roueché centers his story on one pseudonymous man, “Robert Laurence,” a schoolteacher in Forest Hills, New York, whose ordinarily fatal arterial inflammation was miraculously reversed by cortisone, but who, during his recuperation, began to exhibit strange behavior: marked, at first, by excessive energy and enthusiasm (he discovered a newfound passion for shopping), then by new demands on his family, a dictatorial, high-handed manner toward his students, feelings of megalomania, and outbursts to match. His wife described one, which he directed against his family’s taste for television:

He gave a howl that almost froze my blood. No wonder we couldn’t keep pace with him. No wonder we couldn’t given him the sympathy and understanding he needed. No wonder he was all alone. He let out another yell, and dived across the room and shut the program off. Then he backed away a step and doubled up his fist. Maybe this would bring us to our senses. He’d show us what he thought of television. He was going to take his fist and smash that screen to bits.

Nicholas Ray and his screenwriters transformed the teacher’s rage into a form that, for Ray, was altogether personal, and ratcheted the violence up to an even higher and more frightening level. The movie is one of the greatest views of the hidden fractures of family life and the demons that, for some, remain happily below the surface; as the teacher, James Mason disturbingly combines intellect, sensibility, and rage. The muted palette of Ray’s images is slashed by eruptions of luridly bright colors, the strangest of which is the cool purple glow of the little bottle of cortisone pills. Several decades ago, I presented a screening of “Bigger Than Life” at a university film society and spoke afterwards with a classmate, a football player, who told me it was the most frightening movie he’d ever seen. “Bigger Than Life” is not currently available on home video; this revival is not to be missed.